Chapter 30
He surged into the hall like a man possessed.
Guests gasped. Voices cut off.
“Katherine!” he cried, stumbling toward her. “Don’t marry him. I was wrong. I know it now. I threw Samantha out. I gave away my inheritance. I gave up everything. I don’t want any of it. I only want you.”
His words tumbled over each other. He pulled out a dagger and shoved it into her hands, then guided the blade toward his own chest.
“You hate me, don’t you? You should. I made you lose our baby. I chose her over you. I let them punish you. Then kill me. Katherine, kill me if that helps. Just don’t marry someone else.”
He was crying openly now, broken beyond pride.
The hall was silent.
Katherine took the dagger.
Her hand was perfectly steady.
Then she slowly drew it back and let it drop.
The metal struck the floor with a sharp sound.
In Nicholas’s devastated gaze, she lifted her veil.
Her bridal makeup was exquisite. Her face was calm. But her eyes were colder than winter.
“Nicholas,” she said, and her voice carried clearly to every corner of the room, “do you remember what you told me when I begged you not to make me lose our child?”
Nicholas’s face went white.
Katherine smiled through sudden tears.
“You said there would be other children.”
She paused.
Then she spoke each word slowly.
“But there won’t be.”
A stunned silence fell over the room.
“The doctor said the medicine damaged me permanently,” she said. “I may never be able to have children again.”
Nicholas staggered backward.
“No,” he whispered. “No. That can’t be true. You’re lying. We’ll have children. We’ll have so many—”
“There is no we,” Katherine said.
The tears on her face only made her voice steadier.
“You say you love me. Your love made me lose the chance to be a mother. Your love made me take another woman’s punishment. Your love left me bleeding in the rain.
“Your love hurts too much. I don’t want it anymore.”
Then she turned away from him and held out her hand to Elijah.
He took it at once, his grip warm and sure.
“My husband,” she said softly, “let’s continue.”
And so they did.
Nicholas was held down by guards while Katherine and Elijah completed their vows.
He screamed until his voice turned ragged and raw, begging, apologizing, promising anything.
She never looked back.
After the ceremony, Elijah came to him and said in a low voice only he could hear, “Thank you.
“Thank you for letting her go. From now on, she is mine to love, to cherish, to protect. Everything you owe her, I’ll repay a hundredfold.”
Then his eyes turned cold.
“And you can rot inside your regret.”
Nicholas was thrown out into the street.
Inside the house, celebration continued.
Somewhere beyond the bright windows, Katherine was beginning a new life in another man’s arms.
Nicholas knew, with horrible clarity, that he had lost her forever.
Spring came early the following year in Charleston.
Three months into her marriage, Katherine’s life had become something she barely recognized—not because it was grand, though it was, but because it was peaceful.
Elijah was good to her in a way so steady it almost felt unreal. He asked nothing of her past. He never pressed her wounds. He filled her days with warmth so gentle she could finally breathe.
One day, while organizing the study, she found a locked rosewood box.
The key hung in plain sight.
Inside were no jewels, no documents of power.
Only paintings.
Dozens and dozens of paintings.
Katherine reading by a window.
Katherine standing in a garden.
Katherine in a kitchen, sleeves rolled, brow slightly furrowed.
Katherine in a carriage, looking out with quiet sadness.
The earliest painting was from years ago, before she had ever met Elijah properly, capturing one fleeting smile she had given at a holiday street fair.
Every painting was dated.
Every painting was hers.
That night, when Elijah returned, she asked him with red-rimmed eyes, “Why are you so good to me?”
He looked at the open box and immediately understood.
He did not tell her how long he had loved her. He did not tell her how angry he’d been watching her suffer, or how wildly he searched after the cliff.
He only touched the corner of her eye and smiled.
“Because when I found you at the bottom of that cliff,” he said lightly, “you were burning with fever and clinging to my hand. You said if you got another life, you wanted a man whose heart belonged only to you.”
He bent and kissed her forehead.
“I gave you my word.”
Katherine cried then—not from grief, but from something gentler.
And slowly, truly, she began to heal.
As for Nicholas, he came one last time.
It was near a hillside church lined with blooming trees. Katherine was returning from prayer when she saw him waiting by the path.
For a moment she barely recognized him.
He was painfully thin. His clothes hung loose. His face was hollow, his eyes bloodshot and fever-bright. In his hand he clutched prayer beads stained dark at the edges from his own bleeding palms.
He staggered a few steps toward her.
“Katherine,” he whispered. “I come here every day. I pray for you. For our child. Look… I walked on my knees all the way up the hill today…”
He tried to show her the torn fabric at his knees.
Katherine looked at him without expression and kept walking.
Desperate, he threw himself forward and caught the hem of her skirt.
“Please. Look at me. I changed everything. I got rid of Samantha. I gave up the inheritance. I learned to cook Southern food. I cut my hands over and over trying. Just… just look at me once.”
He held up his palms. They were indeed full of cuts and scars.
Katherine looked at him for a long time.
Then she sighed.
“Nicholas,” she said quietly, “let go.”
“I won’t. I’d rather die.”
At that moment, a carriage pulled up nearby.
Elijah stepped down, crossed the distance in a few quick strides, and placed himself at Katherine’s side.
“Mr. Padilla,” he said coolly, “harassing a married woman in broad daylight is beneath even you.”
Nicholas didn’t look at him.
Only at Katherine.
Then Katherine reached up and removed a butterfly hairpin from her hair.
It was old. Faded. Slightly bent with age.
Nicholas’s breath caught.
It was the one he had once bought thoughtlessly from a roadside stand.
Katherine looked at it for a moment.
Then, without hesitation, she threw it into the creek beside the road.
The hairpin hit the water, spun once, and disappeared downstream.
“Nicholas,” she said, watching the current carry it away, “whatever was between us is over. Like that hairpin. Gone is gone. Don’t come again.”
Something broke inside him.
He started laughing.
At first it was quiet, then louder, stranger, almost hysterical.
Then he bent double and coughed blood onto the fallen petals at his feet.
Katherine only looked at him once more.
Her gaze was not cruel.
It was simply empty of everything he had once begged for.
Then she turned, took Elijah’s hand, and left.
Later, Nicholas followed them at a distance into the hills, unsteady as a ghost.
There, at a cliffside overlook, he stopped.
Wind tore at his coat.
Far below, the world disappeared into mist.
“Katherine,” he said, voice shredded by the air, “do you remember? On the cliff… they made me choose. I chose Samantha.”
She did not answer.
He stared into the void.
“I was a fool,” he whispered. “I couldn’t tell treasure from trash. I threw away the only person I should have held onto.”
Then he smiled.
It was a terrible, strangely peaceful smile.
“I owe you a life.”
Before anyone could stop him, he stepped off the edge.
Katherine’s body trembled once.
Elijah caught her instantly and shielded her from the sight below.
Guards rushed to search the ravine.
They found Nicholas alive, barely, broken across the branches of a pine jutting from the cliff face.
When they carried him back up, his body was ruined, blood soaking through everything. But when he saw Katherine, some last fragment of light entered his eyes.
He lifted one shaking hand toward her.
“Katherine…” he rasped. “Please… forgive me…”
Every eye turned to her.
Katherine stepped closer and looked down at him.
This was the man she had once loved beyond reason.
This was also the man who had destroyed her.
He looked at her as if a single nod from her could still save him.
She bent down.
For one blazing second, hope flared in his face.
Then she only moved his hand away from the hem of her dress.
Her touch was gentle.
Her refusal was absolute.
“Nicholas,” she said, “I do not forgive you.”
The light in his eyes died.
Katherine turned away and walked back to Elijah.
Then, before everyone there, she rose on her toes and kissed her husband.
Elijah held her, deepening the kiss with all the quiet certainty of a man who knew exactly whom he loved.
Spring wind moved across the cliffside, carrying the scent of blossoms.
On the stretcher behind them, Nicholas stared until even the strength to stare left him.
One year later, Samantha was living in squalor, discarded by the world she had once manipulated so easily.
And Nicholas?
Nicholas survived the fall, but not truly.
He lost a leg. He lost his title. He lost his mind in pieces.
The Padilla estate faded into ruin around him.
Some days he sat in a wheelchair beneath a flowering tree, clutching an old cloak Katherine had once worn and humming off-key Southern melodies she used to sing absentmindedly by the window.
Some days he raved.
Some days he cried to empty air.
Eventually, even that faded.
In Charleston, life moved on.
On a bright spring afternoon, Katherine stood beside Elijah on a boat gliding across the harbor. The water caught the light in sheets of silver. Wind stirred her hair. Elijah stepped behind her and settled a light shawl around her shoulders.
“It’s breezy,” he murmured. “Don’t catch cold.”
She turned and smiled.
A real smile.
One that reached her eyes.
The old grief was gone from her face now. In its place was calm, color, life.
Elijah loved her openly, patiently, without asking her to shrink or endure or wait.
He taught her business when she wanted to learn. Took her traveling when she wanted to rest. Held her when memories came back sharp in the middle of the night. Never once made her feel like she was asking for too much.
As the boat drifted forward, music floated faintly from another vessel somewhere on the water.
Katherine leaned back into his arms and closed her eyes.
“Do you still think of him?” Elijah asked softly.
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she shook her head.
“No.”
A pause.
“Sometimes I only think… if I had met you first.”
Elijah wrapped his arms tighter around her.
“It isn’t too late,” he said against her hair. “We still have a whole lifetime.”
At that same hour, far away in the crumbling remains of the Padilla estate, spring wind shook loose a cluster of blossoms over a wheelchair in a deserted courtyard.
Nicholas sat there with Katherine’s old cloak in his lap.
For one brief instant, a strange clarity passed through his clouded eyes.
He lowered his head and touched the frayed fabric with trembling fingers, as if trying to memorize it by feel alone.
Then, in a voice barely more than a breath, he hummed that old tune again.
The song faltered.
His hand slipped.
And beneath the falling petals, with the cloak still clutched against his chest, Nicholas Padilla finally went still.
The wind kept blowing.
The blossoms kept falling.
And somewhere far away, on bright southern water under an open sky, Katherine Calhoun did not look back.